Oracle Blog

The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

Wednesday Jun 10, 2009

The highlights from our JavaOne and CommunityOne
2009 conferences are now available. Maijaliisa and I have put
together the short segment on JavaOne 2009 here,
while the CommunityOne West 2009 segment is here.

Wednesday Mar 25, 2009

David
Berlind of InformationWeek sat down with Sun's Cloud Computing CTO Lew
Tucker at our CommunityOne East Developer Conference for a demonstration
of Sun Cloud, specifically the
Virtual Data Center (VDC) design and
deployment tool.

David was impressed. He notes, "... You start picking up servers,
switches, firewalls, etc., and you just drop them into the cloud...
Perhaps
Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (voila!)
Datacenter (in Sun's Cloud that is)."

Tuesday Jun 24, 2008

BBC World
News prepared
a list of best cloud computing applications available
today, and it featured Sun's Network.com and Blender 3D. The article
noted how Sun's data centers are available for hire by the hour to
power on-demand cloud services. The author mentioned that Network.com
is used mainly for processing scientific data but the servers can also
be used for rendering animations via the open source Blender
software.

Check out this BBC
video clip featuring Sun's cloud computing efforts
as well as snippets from the "Big
Buck Bunny" movie rendered on
Network.com.

Sunday Jun 01, 2008

Big Buck Bunny is a
comedy about a well-tempered rabbit "Big Buck," who
finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three
rodents. In the typical 1950s cartoon tradition, Big Buck then prepares
for the rodents in a comical revenge.

What is great about the movie is that it is "open." What is an "open
movie?" Well, "open movie" promotes open content creation in a
community setting.

For "Big Buck Bunny," it is not only developed by an animator community using open source
software Blender but also
distributed under an open license that gives
artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files
used to make the movie.

"The primary intent of the movie was
to stimulate the development of
open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an
artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you
would expect from large animation studios," said Ton Roosendaal,
producer and Blender Institute director.

The Blender team didn't have support of a big studio, yet they
succeeded
with the community support, an open source rendering software and an
on-demand computing platform.

And the last part is where we came in. Blender team needed over fifty
thousand CPU-hours of compute time, and our Network.com grid
services provided them a very powerful platform where they could
use
hundreds of CPUs simultaneously to significantly speed up the movie
rendering process without needing to own the compute infrastructure.

For all the geeks out there, here
is how it happened -- technically
speaking -- over the Network.com grid platform.

Shining example of... the power of community (and lowering barriers to
entry for producing a computer-animated movie), if you ask me.